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Megan McArdle

The Mandarinization of America

I’m hinting at the final problem, which is that this ostensibly meritocratic system increasingly selects from those with enough wealth and connections to first, understand the system, and second, prepare the right credentials to enter it–as I believe it also did in Imperial China.

And like all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there’s anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

As I say, the mandarins are in many senses deserving: they work very hard, and they are very smart. But there is one important thing they do not know, which is what it is like to be anyone except a mandarin. The first generation to come out of the postwar education revolution did; their parents frequently had quite banal jobs, possibly ones that left them with dirt under their fingernails after a day’s work. …

But the people entering journalism, or finance, or consulting, or any other “elite” profession, are increasingly the children of the children of those who rocketed to prosperity through the postwar education system. A window that opened is closing. The mandarins are pulling away from the rest of America.

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The mandarins will be the first ones to the guillotines when Americans have finally had enough of the self-important, arrogant, elitist know-nothing’s. These Mandarins are responsible for our current economic situation, refuse to allow us to access our vast energy reserves, and constantly tell us we must live as they tell us.

Yeah, you’re either wicked smart or not to make it in Silicon Valley. Credentialism just doesn’t do it for the folks out there.

Actually, Peter Thiel even rails against such credentialism.

The bottom line is we haven’t had an “elite” since around the early 1960s. Today’s politicians, financiers, media moguls, etc. are just incompetent and alien rubes who the country no longer looks to for leadership. They managed to buy or muscle their way in without developing the character, experience, and class to lead.

Oh, and they’re mostly socialists who despise this country and Western civilization.

All elites are good at rationalizing their eliteness, whether it’s meritocracy or “the divine right of kings.” The problem is the mandarin elite has some good arguments. They really are very bright and hardworking. It’s just that they’re also prone to be conformist, risk averse, obedient, and good at echoing the opinions of authority, because that is what this sort of examination system selects for.

This is why the establishment elite, such as those in the MSM, can’t fathom that we actually live in under soft tyranny. They don’t question the left/right nonsense as long as its for more powerful and bloated government.

The mandarins will be the first ones to the guillotines when Americans have finally had enough of the self-important, arrogant, elitist know-nothing’s. These Mandarins are responsible for our current economic situation, refuse to allow us to access our vast energy reserves, and constantly tell us we must live as they tell us.

Totally misses the educational lineage, which is more important in this instance than bloodline. Colleges isolate students and act to separate them from the values of their families, such that it is the sequence of educational succession that really contributes to the “mandarin” problem.